Design of an efficient energy harvesting rectifier circuit for powering Wireless Sensor Nodes

With the recent development in wireless communication systems and wireless sensors, Wireless Sensor Network (WSNs) have drawn worldwide attention to control and monitor the physical environment away from places that could be dangerous or challenging to access. The sensor nodes have no power supply. Therefore, the energy harvesting technique is a key solution that has shown good potential instead of their battery dependency. This paper presents a design and simulation of an efficient RF energy harvesting rectifier circuit for powering WSNs nodes. The single and multi-stages of the voltage doubler rectifier (VDR) circuit based on HSMS 2860 Schottky barrier diode (SBDs) has been simulated using layout and investigated at the operating frequency of 5.8 GHz using ADS software. The simulated results achieve a good performance at the optimum load (RL) of 2.2k. The conversion efficiency and DC output voltage of single stage VDR are about 74% and 3.85 V respectively at the RF input power of 20dBm. Finally, the simulation results of the proposed circuit have been obtained using layout EM Co-Simulation, lumped element LC, and Microstrip transmission line MTL are better matched.